Blogs and Forum

JManga just shot out an email announcing that the public can now sign up for their beta lottery. Go to jmanga.com/beta_signup to sign up, and you'll apparently be entered into a lottery to get into the beta. The site is, um, a little vague on details.

JManga plans to be an English-language digital manga site, which claims to have deals with 39 Japanese manga publishers. This could be a central part of the future of digital manga in English. We could really use an "official MangaFox."

According to Gundam Ace, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko's manga re-imagining of the original Mobile Suit Gundam, Gundam: The Origin, will be adapted into an anime work soon. This jives with an earlier report of another new Gundam anime project to be announced this Saturday.

Now, Bandai's Chief Gundam Officer stated several years ago that he'd love to see a modern, well-animated remake of original Gundam. I wonder if this is his dream come true.

I hope this will be a great way to introduce American fans to Gundam, by showing them the original story, but produced in an updated, slick way. Honestly, modern fans have a really tough time with MSG's rough 1970's animation. Will this finally be Gundam's gateway into sustained fandom in America?

Studio Ghibli's The Borrower Arrietty has already sold 127,365 DVDs, making it the top-selling anime release in Japan only 5 days after it launched. Good for Ghlbli!

Separately, the film will feature two different dub casts when released internationally, one for the U.S. and another for the U.K. That honestly makes no sense to me; do the licensors think that Americans won't listen to an English-accented dub or vice versa? I'd honestly like to listen to an English dub.